May, 2006

 

Regarding the Electronic Urantia Book Archive

An overview by Larry Watkins

 

The Urantia Book Historical Archive consists of an electronic component and a physical component. I’ll concentrate on the electronic aspect.

 

In October of last year a project was begun to preserve paper documents relating to Urantia Book history using David Kantor’s accumulated files as the starting point so that David didn’t have to continue to store them. The initial plan for freeing up storage space was to electronically preserve the document by scanning them and then to destroy them.

 

Larry Watkins took a box of documents home with him to come up with an electronic  preservation plan in collaboration with David. It was decided that scanning documents in color into PDF file format at a relatively low resolution to keep file sizes manageable was an appropriate way to proceed since Adobe PDF is used worldwide for document preservation purposes. Scanning began in October and continues today.

 

Some on-line space on the Fellowship’s server was allocated to begin housing the scanned files. Once a foundation of documents had been accumulated a method for retrieving and viewing them became necessary. It was decided that using a browser and HTML files was the simplest way to proceed and a program was written to process the scanned files to produce HTML files for their viewing. At that time we also decided that a file name is not descriptive enough and that what really was needed was for someone to read the scanned documents and write up brief descriptions of their contents so they could be searched. David sent out a request to the societies list asking if anyone was interested in working with this blooming archive and we immediately got a response from Victoria Clark. As the first box of materials was about to head out on its way to the dumpster one of her first correspondences was “don’t destroy anything” so the transfer of documents to a collection point was begun; the initial collection point being Larry’s sister’s garage.

 

Shortly after Victoria volunteered to become a reader/cataloger of the on-line documents, Dick Johnson also volunteered his services and Dick and Victoria have been reading and cataloging the contents of the scanned documents since November. In early November Kristen Michaels indicated she’d be happy to help out and volunteered to rescan the approximately 500 documents that were available on-line at that time at higher resolution so that they could be converted to OCR and indexed by the Adobe software. The higher resolution also renders the documents suitable for reprinting and preserves the quality of images and photos; we continue the double scanning, Larry at lower resolution for internet access and Kristen at higher resolution for preservation. Kristen added her considerable document library to the archive and in March Victoria sent about 90 pounds of documents and books that she had collected. We’ve also received documents from the Jesusonian Foundation, Patrick McNelly, Ray Skaggs, John Hay, Don Green and Carolyn Kendall.

 

As more and more documents became available and the physical and electronic accumulation grew Victoria started working on locating an appropriate site to house the physical materials which now included not only documents but books, journals and newsletters, photos, VCR tapes, cassette tapes, DVDs and CDs and diskettes. She began the process of establishing and organizing The Urantia Book Historical Society. The intent of the archive and the focus of the Historical Society is to preserve the records of the events and activities within the Urantia movement without regard to political interplay.

 

Since the 1960s and before there has been talk of establishing an archive to preserve Urantia Book history. During the ‘80s and 90s the Special Projects Committee of the Fellowship had many meetings and discussions about this specific project; concrete results just never materialized.

 

As of the end of May, 2006, the electronic portion of the archive consists of about 18,000 documents using 40GB of disk storage. Of that there are over 3,000 documents on-line and just over 1,000 of them have been cataloged. The physical portion of the archive, which Kristen is now holding until a permanent home is established, is perhaps 1,000 pounds and 25 cubic feet. This is still just the tip of the iceberg.

 

There are a number of issues where more help could be used. First, having more people involved with cataloging the scanned files would help reduce the backlog. Second, good biographical sketches of the authors need to be provided. Third, each organization and society should make provision to scan their own records or to contribute them to the archive. Individuals with collections should also either contribute them, scan them themselves, or ask to have them scanned and returned. Fourth, as the collection grows the usefulness of the HTML method for providing access to the archive diminishes — it would be beneficial now to begin looking for better ways of file storage and retrieval. Fifth, a custodian(s) of the archive needs to emerge – someone who can organize the collection, categorize materials expeditiously, remove redundancies, perform general housekeeping on the collection.

 

Access to the cataloged and on-line portion of the archive is through

 

Larry Watkins

May, 2006